Civilisation has made its own destruction so profitable that its survival now constitutes a threat to the economy.
Our political and commercial systems profit from the crises they perpetuate, rendering meaningful dissent unintelligible and civilisational failure commercially indispensable.
The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.
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The Attention Engine
Civilisations have collapsed before. What distinguishes ours is a communications economy that profits from accelerating the disturbances society must then struggle to absorb. The danger lies in a recursive feedback system that rewards instability while transferring its consequences to everyone else.
From social media and human psychology to Gaia and cosmic self-regulation, an exploration of identity, feedback, emergence and the illusion of control.
What if immortality is not living forever, but something more fundamental? An exploration of consciousness, logical incompleteness, spiritual existence and the possibility that death is essential to life.
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
Institutional incompetence fuels political opportunism. Social media rewards outrage, nobody accepts responsibility, and democracy inherits the bill.
Governments invest heavily in defending against foreign interference while neglecting the administrative failures that make societies vulnerable. Bureaucracy has perfected the art of becoming indispensable without necessarily becoming useful.
How engagement incentives, selective censorship and data extraction weaken cooperation, and why peace depends on changing what our communications systems reward.
As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
We have spent billions of years becoming what we are, yet our political and economic systems increasingly reward the destruction of the complex relationships that sustain us. What we stand to lose is beyond calculation, and the tragedy is how unnecessary so much of it is.
